By Alfred Read
The outbreak of war in Eastern Europe has again put the institution of the United Nations in the spotlight. If its original goal of securing international peace and security are to be achieved, the UN needs to abandon its fixation on the Woke politics of the west and return to the fundamentals of its founding.
It's April 1945. World War Two is close to ending, the allied advance into western and eastern Europe is tearing the guts from a “Third Reich” that was supposed to last for a “thousand years”. Millions have died at this point, with entire cities being reduced to rubble as nations fight for their very survival against an aggressor that had until recently most of Europe under its heel. All eyes thus look to Berlin, the fall of which will finally spell an end to German ambitions and ensure the resumption of peace for an entire continent. It's a hard fought battle, and one that is not to be concluded without considerable loss and unimaginable hardship.
On the other side of the Atlantic more delicate matters are afoot. Representatives of fifty nations are meeting in San Francisco, all of them of a mind to discuss the nature of the changed world they are about to inherit as Nazi Germany goes down in defeat. Several months of discussions follow, the end result leading to the creation of the Charter of the United Nations and the transition to a new rules-based international order. There are high hopes, and the prospect of a lasting peace has never been more appealing.
We've come a long way since then. In its ongoing efforts to prevent the outbreak of a new global conflict, the United Nations has taken a position on all manner of vitally important issues, like calling upon people to use “gender neutral language” and for children to be indoctrinated into thinking that gender itself is apparently a social construct. Various appendages of the UN system have elsewhere gone all in on the degenerate Wokery afflicting much of the western world, endorsing the whole raft of postmodern gobbledygook so loved by our faith-hating “liberal” elites in the US and Europe. The merciless depravity of the so-called “sexual revolution”, itself a product of the US and utterly antithetical to the beliefs of most of the world's population, is now apparently the UN's subject of choice. Impressive work, for an organisation originally set up in the aftermath of the Holocaust for the sake of trifling matters like preventing another world war.
Sarcasm aside, are we not now closer to a serious global conflagration than we have ever been over the past several decades? Don't we therefore need the United Nations, whose own Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights may yet still provide a means towards a brighter, more peaceful future? Those are valid points to make, and the two documents cited above remain foundational texts for anyone serious about both world peace and securing human dignity.
Unfortunately the United Nations has largely lost its way, appearing entirely impotent to prevent the current conflict in Ukraine and being generally useless to stop much of anything in the years before that. There's a simple reason as to why. Certain nations simply stopped taking the UN seriously, and without the support of the major powers the UN is nothing but a talking shop for overpaid diplomats. Its ultimate fall to special interest groups and the twisted, amoral Wokeism of the EU and liberal US was thus perhaps inevitable. To understand how this happened we'll have to go back in time a little further.
2003 was an interesting year for quite a few reasons. The obvious one is that it was the year the UK and US invaded Iraq, ultimately toppling their former ally Saddam Hussain and entirely failing to replace him with an administration capable of much of anything. The invasion itself was also deemed illegal by the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, something that seriously damaged the public image of the US and UK and yet also exposed the UN itself as being impotent in the face of aggression by prominent global powers.
What is curious is that this invasion was initially justified through recourse to UN Security Council resolution 1441. Passed in 2002, this ruling (in typically elaborate language) repeatedly lambasts Iraq for its apparent failure to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors and provide full disclosure on its alleged efforts to develop WMDs. At the time 1441 met unanimous approval from the major powers on the Security Council, with the usual intransigents such as Russia and China actually seeing eye to eye with their typical rivals in the form of the US and UK.
Unfortunately for Mr Bush and Mr Blair such a rare display of unity did not persist when it came to their decision to actually attack Iraq, as all other members of the UNSC refused to have anything to do with military action and rightly viewed the actions of Britain and America as morally and legally suspect. As unpleasant as Saddam Hussein was, launching a full scale invasion on the basis of dubious intelligence and egotistical posturing didn't pass muster with China, Russia, France and the UN's own Secretary General. What had started as an alleged effort to enforce UNSC 1441 turned out to be just rank opportunism. Bush and Blair wanted their war, and they got one, albeit one that lasted longer than either of them would have liked.
A lesson to be drawn from this episode is that it highlights just how vulnerable the UN system was to being manipulated and then discarded once it no longer served a purpose. If the US/UK had been serious about observing international law via Resolution 1441 then they would have simply continued to work within the confines of the UNSC, with military force only becoming applicable when the rest of the Security Council deemed it necessary. Yet once the other members of the UNSC had made their anti-war credentials known, the US and UK had no issue with attacking Iraq anyway, even if it undermined and violated outright the UN's own Charter. It made them look bad, for certain, but the damage done to the UN was arguably far more severe. What's the point in international law, or indeed any law, if it can be discard so easily, with absolutely no consequences for the offenders?
We've not recovered from that point on. Despite sporadic posturing on its peace-making credentials, the UN appears to have given up on securing international stability, preferring instead to fixate on the aforementioned Wokery and as well as alienating people of all religions through its fanatical endorsement of globalised abortion. When another moment came for it to shine in 2008 during the South Ossetian crisis, the UNSC played a generally passive role, with Russia ultimately deciding to resolve the issue with an all-out military offensive against Georgia.
Likewise a few years later during the Libyan civil war the UNSC voted in favour of a “no fly zone” over the country, apparently for the sake of protecting civilians. In reality it became a justification for NATO's bombardment of the country in its ultimately successful campaign to oust Muammar Gaddafi. Whilst some at the time might have thought this to be a noble goal, the resulting power vacuum led to the onset of yet another civil war, with the resulting refugee crisis and proliferation in human trafficking still persisting to this day. The United Nations has since responded to the situation by establishing a “support mission” in Libya, an entity that seems eager to stress its political rather than military nature. Modern day slavers take note.
The most recent débâcle is of course Ukraine. Unlike Iraq, Georgia and Libya, where the outbreak of open war was relatively sudden, Ukraine has actually been beset by armed conflict since 2014. In that respect there was every opportunity to try to bring a peaceful resolution to the fore, even in light of Kiev's persistent failure to implement the Minsk Accords or indeed observe a proper cease fire in the contested separatist zones in the east. Whilst Russia's full scale invasion would have been incredibly difficult to denounce short of expelling Russia from the Security Council (a downright stupid idea nonetheless actually endorsed by the west's supposedly “educated” commentariat) there had been ample opportunity for the UN to play a larger role beforehand, one that it, sadly, seems to have squandered.
The tragedy here is that, despite its initially noble intentions, the United Nations has persistently shown itself to be incapable of maintaining global security as long as any major power puts its own interests over and above international law. Whilst this was still arguably the case in the 20th century, the structural weaknesses of the UN system have only been exposed further following the humiliation of 2003 and Washington/London's subsequent breaching of the UN's Charter in Iraq. Its sudden and suspicious commitment to Wokeism has not helped, putting the UN's apparatus in stark opposition to the beliefs and cultures of the vast majority of the world's population. Why they have decided to go along with this is an open question, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the UN is increasingly aware that it's unable and perhaps unwilling to do much in terms of its original purpose. Aligning itself with the degenerate, tradition-hating liberal elites in both the US and EU might therefore be perceived as a means towards greater credibility.
If that's the case they are even more out of touch than they appear. Wokeism, and all the predatory insanity that comes with it, is only really embraced by a noisy and deeply narcissistic minority of people within a handful of nations. By aligning itself with such “values” the UN is putting itself at odds with much of the world, in the process forfeiting its right to pretend to represent anyone, united or otherwise. If it wishes to be taken seriously again it needs to go back to the fundamentals that it was founded upon. The men and women who drafted the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights had just lived through the most destructive conflict in human history. They did not want such a thing to ever happen again. Our present leaders should look back on the gravity of such times and then act accordingly. Rainbow flags and nonsensical pronouns can wait, hopefully indefinitely. Peace cannot. It's about time that was understood.
By Alfred Read is a journalist who writes for LIBERTATIO. follow his article and work here